LWN.net Logo

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:00 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll by scientes
Parent article: Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Yes I am a well known troll, thank you.
But pray tell, where within the string "Natty" do you see a numeric version? Or in the example page I linked to?


(Log in to post comments)

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:40 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Is Windows 8 before the Windows 2008? And what about Windows 3.11?

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:44 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

Why is everyone using Windows 7 when Windows 95 is out?

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 6:17 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

Flawless logic. If Microsoft does it for Windows every 5 years, surely the same naming scheme makes perfect sense for a free Linux distribution with 0.001% of the users and a 6-month release cycle. But of course simple numbers like 2000 or 95 or 2008 are way too dull and every user MUST remember at all times a list of 20 nonsensical word combinations - otherwise they don't deserve to use our distribution.

That's a winning strategy right there.

Oh, by the way, how often do you use RHEL release names? When was the last time you saw "Red Hat Santiago" used instead of "RHEL 6"?

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 12:06 UTC (Sat) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]

>But pray tell, where within the string "Natty" do you see a numeric version? Or in the example page I linked to?

I googled "ubuntu name natty" sans the quotes. The first page to pop up?
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

Was that so tough?

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 13:31 UTC (Sat) by udp (guest, #80701) [Link]

I think the point is that you shouldn't _have_ to google anything to compare two versions.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 15:46 UTC (Sat) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]

As scientes pointed out you do not have to. Ubuntu releases are alphabetical. Easy to tell where a release is relative to another. It is clear from the link I posted that the "silly" names are used only during development as the release date used for the official name is not known.

That said, no one really uses them. I'm posting this from Fedora 16, not Verne. Before F16 I ran F11 not Leonidas. I was pointing out to mikov that on the rare occasion someone refers to a release by a name instead of a number you can discover what you desire by taking a whopping 3.5 seconds out of you busy schedule.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 16:39 UTC (Sat) by udp (guest, #80701) [Link]

I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I had no idea the release names were alphabetical until reading this discussion.

Version numbers are a convention that everyone understands.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 22, 2012 12:38 UTC (Sun) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

The Ubuntu ones certainly aren't; lots of people don't realise that they're date based. That doesn't stop it being a good system (much like alphabetical code names), but you still need to take the minimal trouble to understand the way it works.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 20:56 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

How often do you really need to compare two version numbers? And what does the comparison tell you? I mean, if I say I'm using Wigwam Linux v4.3, you won't have the faintest idea whether that release is five years old, or two weeks. And if someone else says they're using Wigwam Linux v6.1, well, yes, you probably know that's newer than the version I'm using, but how does that help you or anyone else? Maybe Wigwam releases new versions weekly, and both those versions are from 2004.

If you want to get any useful information from a version number, you're probably going to have to turn to google anyway, and googling numbers is no fun.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 21:15 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

precisely, yet if you go to the url that mikov mentioned ( http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gcc ) you actually get something a little more useful and possibly more memorable: the version of gcc the system is compiled with.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 21, 2012 23:16 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

Your assertion seems to be that release names and versions numbers are equally useless, so we might as well use something silly and fun.

I have to disagree on two counts however:

- Ubuntu version numbers, being a year and month, are very informative and useful. They are brilliant, actually.

- Release names, on the other hand, are very hard to remember, especially for non native English speakers. I can easily remember 11.10 but "Oneiric Ocelot" might as well be "Blebliah Blobleliebhu"; both sound like gibberish to me the first time I hear them. They are non-translatable and un-pronounceable in other languages.

Internal code names are good, but release names should be publicly visible only if they are associated with a real marketing campaign and are not more frequent than once every couple of years.

This is simply common sense, and frankly I am shocked at the opposition.

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 23, 2012 13:53 UTC (Mon) by AAP (guest, #721) [Link]

In fact, I have a mental block on the name of the current Ubuntu release. My mind keeps thinking "Ornery Onslot", even though I know that's not right. And I keep thinking the next one should be some sort of Penguin. :p

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 23, 2012 19:40 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

You say the version numbers are useful, and to support this theory, you...say they're useful. Looks a bit like circular reasoning to me. Can you provide some realistic examples of their utility? (And just so you know, I think that versioned dependencies should be on tools, not distros, and preventing people from declaring versioned dependencies on entire distros is actually a Good Thing(tm).)

Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll

Posted Apr 23, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

when talking to someone, it's a lot easier to say "I'm using Ubuntu 12.04" than to say I'm using a distro with these library versions:

linux-vdso.so.1
libgssapi_krb5.so.2
libldap_r-2.4.so.2
libtinfo.so.5
liblber-2.4.so.2
libssl.so.1.0.0
libpam.so.0
libkrb5.so.3
libcrypto.so.1.0.0
libpthread.so.0
libc.so.6
libk5crypto.so.3
libcom_err.so.2
libkrb5support.so.0
libresolv.so.2
libsasl2.so.2
libgssapi.so.3
libgnutls.so.26
libgcrypt.so.11
libdl.so.2
libkeyutils.so.1
libz.so.1
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2(0x00007f285f88e000)
libheimntlm.so.0
libkrb5.so.26
libasn1.so.8
libhcrypto.so.4
libroken.so.18
libtasn1.so.3
libp11-kit.so.0
libgpg-error.so.0
libwind.so.0
libheimbase.so.1
libhx509.so.5
libsqlite3.so.0
libcrypt.so.1

and have to give different sets of libraries for each program you are using.

applications should not depend on specific distro versions, but for users and support people the one version number encapsulates a very large number of specific versions

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds